Cooperative Situational Awareness for Wireless Networks (COOPNET)

Devices in wireless networks are no longer used only for communicating binary information, but also for navigation and to sense their surroundings. We are currently approaching fundamental limitations in terms of communication throughput, position information availability and accuracy, and decision making based on sensory data. The goal of this proposal is to understand how the cooperative nature of future wireless networks can be leveraged to perform timekeeping, positioning, communication, and decision making, so as to obtain orders of magnitude performance improvements compared to current architectures. Our research will have implications in many fields and will comprise fundamental theoretical contributions as well as a cooperative wireless testbed. The fundamental contributions will lead to a deep understanding of cooperative wireless networks and will enable new pervasive applications which currently cannot be supported. The testbed will be used to validate the research, and will serve as a kernel for other researchers worldwide to advance knowledge on cooperative networks. Our work will build on and consolidate knowledge currently dispersed in different scientific disciplines and communities (such as communication theory, sensor networks, distributed estimation and detection, environmental monitoring, control theory, positioning and timekeeping, distributed optimization). It will give a new thrust to research within those communities and forge relations between them.